Relevant History

Ah Ryanair, will you never cease pushing the boundaries of customer service?

My nemesis, Ryanair (which I flew several times last year), has announced a brave new era in customer service:

RyanAir this week announced that they will soon eliminate all airport check-in counters and require passengers to carry-on their luggage. Starting early next year, passengers will need to schlep their bags through airport security and drop them at the steps of the plane for checking into plane's cargo hold. Once aboard though, there will be gambling!

Not exactly going to have Virgin Air quaking in its boots.

My favorite comment: "It's like Ryanair has ceased to become an air carrier and has become a Brecktean improv group."

[h/t to Nancy]

Bloomington

I've been in Bloomington, Indiana for a conference on visualization and the history and philosophy of science. It's one of those events that brings together my old life as an historian, and my new life as a futurist: on one hand we're mainly talking about how visualizations of scientific communities and social dynamics can be used by historians and philosophers; on the other I suspect that there are cool things I could do with these maps to forecast the future of science.

the official conference picture, via flickr

There's one other think-tank person here, which saves me from being the one non-academic Ph.D. in the room, the scholarly equivalent of Stephen Colbert's one black friend.

There have been some efforts to use scinometric (or "science of science") maps in the history of science, but so far as I know, most of this work has followed fairly conventional historiographic paths: for example, mapping the Darwin or Mersenne correspondence, or asking questions about the growth of scholarly networks. We've not yet used them to something radically new, like using geographical coding to calculate the speed of the transmission of ideas or instruments, or constructing agent-based models of scientific communities and seeing how they evolve over time. But that's why we're here-- to think about how we could create such things, and what benefit they might bring.

I quite like Bloomington, or the few blocks of Bloomington that I've seen.

via flickr

The place is enormous. It has roughly the same number of students as Berkeley, but physically it's much larger. It also takes collegiate Gothic (a somewhat stripped-down, modernized version) to a scale I don't think I've never seen before. If you took Princeton or Bryn Mawr, put it on a balloon, then blew up the balloon to five times its previous size, you'd get the IU campus. Yale and University of Chicago bear some family resemblance to Oxford or Cambridge, thanks to their small scale; IU takes Gothic where it's never gone before.

via flickr

It's also pretty heavily wooded. There are a couple streams that flow through the campus, and they're surrounded by forest and crisscrossed with little footbridges.

campus tuesday night, via flickr

the same location, wednesday afternoon, via flickr

The town has a lot of restaurants, and a lot of foreign food, for a place its size. Tuesday night I had dinner at an Ethiopian restaurant, and last night it was Thai at Siam House. (Both are a serious challenge to dieting!) One local attributed this to the long presence of foreign students at IU, some of whom brought spouses or other relatives who went into the restaurant business. I have no way of knowing if this is true, but for whatever reason, there's good food here.

siam house, via flickr

There's a bit of a restaurant row, small places in old houses. That's cool, as it gives the restaurants a more informal character.

restaurant row, via flickr

There are also rabbits that come out in the evening, which adds one more little (furry and bouncy) note of whimsy to the place.

insouciant bunny, via flickr

Delays and altruism on the road

I'm in the shuttle from Indianapolis to Bloomington. I got here six hours late, as I gave up my seat on last night's redeye in exchange for an early morning flight. I'm not sure it was a good trade. On one hand, I did get $350 (though it's not cash, I need to use it in the next year, and I'm sure US Airways hopes that I'll lose it rather than use it), and I won't miss any of the critical conference stuff-- I'll still get there in time for this evening's dinner. On the other, I gave up the chance to spend a day exploring Bloomington (though whether the town would really provide entertainment worth $60/hour is unknowable) and do a little early networking. And I accepted the airline's offer to stay in a hotel, though that turned out to be a wash: yes it was free, but it took longer to get the shuttle than I expected, which ate into ime I would have spent sleeping.

On my East Coast trip, I did something similar. I got into JFK around 2 in the morning, in that dead time when the airport has effectively shut down. After about half an hour I got the Supershuttle, and immediately settled in and dozed off. A few minutes later, the driver woke me up Two couples needed to go to Long Island, and if he didn't take them, they'd be stranded and have to spend the night in the airport. Could he take them, and drop them off at their homes first?

I was too groggy to ask why they couldn't drop me off first and then take the other passengers, and I wasn't really obliged to say yes. But my flight was already several hours late, and so I kind of felt like, what's a couple hours more? Plus, I know how much it can suck to be stuck in an airport: for all the appearance of luxury, they're really places designed to move people in and out as efficiently as possible, and are sullenly hostile to people who find themselves stuck. And, in some way, having had such a great time the precious few days at the conference and reconnecting with friends, I suspected that karma would catch up with me if I said no. It was time to rebalance.

So I said yes. We picked up the other passengers, who were pretty damn grateful to be going home. We then barreled out of JFK, promptly got lost, and spent the next half hour trying to figure out how to get to Stony East Oyster Point, or wherever. By the time we rolled up to the Paramount, it was about 5:30 in the morning.

Maybe I've done enough of this kind of thing for the year. But what matters is that I'm here now.

And the flight here was fine. I changed planes in Phoenix, which was a bit more direct a route than my original itinerary, which had me connecting through Charlotte, North Carolina (sigh). And I brought along a copy of Richard Sennett's The Craftsman, which is a wonderfully stimulating book, and which I realize I can blend into three different things I'm working on (that I've got three different-- and more to the point, unfinished-- pieces going simultaneously is a fact we shall not linger over).

Giant babies

This is the kind of thing lifeblogging and Flickr make possible: comparative studies of giant babies!

changi airport, singapore, 2008, via flickr

times square, new york, 2009, via flickr

The great Strawberry Street Cafe reunion

Wednesday night I got together with some high school friends, and my high school choir director, for dinner at Strawberry Street Cafe, a restaurant in the Fan.

strawberry street cafe, via flickr

These are people I was pretty close to in high school-- I spent a huge amount of time doing choir stuff, and several of us were also the core group for the school's honors and AP courses-- but haven't seen in person for a very long time, and reconnected with on Facebook over the last year or so.

I chose Strawberry Street Cafe because everyone knows where it is, it's kid-friendly, and because I didn't really know it. The place was just a couple years old when I started high school, and it advertised regularly on the radio, so I heard about it... but never went there myself. It remained part of a cool grown-up Richmond that I was too young and poor to visit myself. Reconnecting with my past social reality in a place from a past imagined landscape seemed nicely symmetrical.

strawberry street, via flickr

It was especially lovely to see my music teacher, who was a terrific influence on me, and who went on to run a very successful intensive performing arts school, from which she's retiring in a few weeks. She was an influence not just because I spent a lot of time in her classes, or because I've continued to play (I have my old guitars, but don't really use them; I expect my daughter is going to take them over sooner or later). Of course I continue to love music, but I peaked as a musician in college (I didn't want to devote the time to meeting ever-higher performance standards, to say nothing of taking the hit on my grades). But I learned a lot from her about how to perform, and those bits of craft and instinct have been a great help. It's not just that workshops and talks are performances, obviously they are; but I think you can fruitfully think of a lot of knowledge work as one kind of performance or another. As the Bard said, all the world's a stage; so knowing how to play is always going to be useful.

me and my music teacher

It was a nice reminder that some of the organizing tools I use for work and research are ones that I can use in my social life as well. When you spend a lot of your time with books and words, and come from a profession that alternated solitary contemplation and intensive gossip about colleagues, but featured very little genuine planned collaboration, it's easy to develop a sense of yourself as not that social, and maybe not that good at it. Wrong. As one of my daughter's friends once told a boy who was teasing her about being introverted, "I'm not an introvert. I'm very extroverted. I just don't like you very much."

And even if I do test as an introvert on some psychological scale, I can fake it.

There were eleven of us at the dinner, including two kids, four and five years old. (Most of my class seems to either have 5 year-olds, or 15 year-olds; I'm the only one with one in the middle.) Two of my cohort married each other, two others had remained in regular contact these last 25+ years, but the rest of us were at best erratically connected. So it wasn't just me parachuting into an old social circle for an evening; it was a chance for the circle to reconstitute itself. I don't know why I assumed that people who'd remained in or returned to Richmond after college would have stayed in touch-- Richmond is a big place after all, and life does intrude on old connections-- but the fact that many of us were reconnecting after years was pleasant. It wasn't any less something that people were doing for me... but it was also something I was able to do for them.

And Strawberry Street Cafe was a good choice: the food is good, they were very gracious about our ever-expanding party, and they were welcoming of the kids. For me, it was good for another, entirely unexpected, reason.

For whatever reason I had no desire to go back to my old high school, to the apartments we lived in, or other places I saw on a daily basis; both Mom and I opted for the places that we always thought were special, like the VMFA and Maymont Park. (As one of the characters in Dune memorably put it, "People I miss. A place is just a place." While I admire that gruff practicality and emphasis on loyalty to comrades and family, I don't actually agree with it at all-- places do matter-- but some places remain more attractive than others, for whatever mysterious reason.)

the fan, via flickr

Walking through the Fan, I was struck by how well it compares with similar neighborhoods in Philadelphia or Boston or San Francisco, and how it feels like a great urban area for kids and families; I could appreciate the immense amount of energy that's gone into restoration and renovation of the turn-of-the-century housing stock. As someone intimately familiar with parenting and property ownership, I could appreciate things I couldn't twenty-five years ago, and imagine myself there.

virginia museum of fine arts, via flickr

Likewise, I always liked VFMA, but it felt like an expression of Richmond polite society, a UFO populated by Izod-wearing aliens. But I've spent time in the British Museum and MOMA and the Smithsonian and DMA, I've given a talk at the Globe Theatre, I have a wallet full of membership cards to Bay Area institutions; I'm no longer alien to these people, I am them.

And I can now appreciate that the nicest parts of Maymont compare favorably with similar places in England and the Continent: it's not just a lonely Old South wannabe of a great estate, it IS a great estate.

maymont park, via flickr

Staying away from my high school Richmond and planting myself squarely in the places I imagined as defining grown-up Richmond let me start seeing the place differently. Maybe it's the start of a relationship with the place that has less to do with who I was, than with who I am. Which is good, because in the last year I had the very distinct sense of part of my old self being sloughed off, to make room for something new.

I thought I was visiting to reconnect with some of my past, but maybe I was visiting to create a future.

[To the tune of Carly Simon, "You Belong to Me," from the album Carly Simon: Clouds in My Coffee 1965-1995 (I give it 3 stars).]

Linden Row Inn

Wednesday night while in Richmond I stayed at the Linden Row Inn, in downtown. I think technically this is the edge of the historic Fan district, or just outside. I've been staying in lots of different kinds of hotels the last couple years, ranging from serious business hotels to things out of Blade Runner. This is way up there one the historically interesting, quirky in a Southern and slightly Gothic kind of way. It's a tremendous little hotel, and I've had a great time here.

via flickr

The hotel is actually five buildings, built at different times. The buildings facing the street were joined together, forming a walled compound, and two buildings are in the center, in the garden. It's sort of like a topologically complex version of London's Goodenough Club, or the creation of an antebellum Frank Gehry.

via flickr

The buildings have an interesting history. Edgar Allen Poe spent part of his childhood living in the compound after his mother died. (According to the hotel Web site, "Local legend has it that this was the 'enchanted garden' that Poe mentions in his famous poem, 'To Helen.'")

"Nevermore! Nevermore!"

After that, it was a succession of girls' schools-- first the Southern Female Institute (possibly my favorite name for anything anywhere, and a brilliant girls' rock band name), then Mrs. Pegram's, and finally Miss Ellet's School (which eventually became St. Catherine's, where a friend of mine teaches). So that adds an interesting little twist to the place. The doors to some of the suites still have plaques that read "Miss [Teacher's Name] Parlour."

via flickr

There's also a "Miss Scott's Alley." I have to wonder what she taught....

via flickr

The rooms themselves and the service are fine. There's a basic free continental breakfast, and-- and this is the real treat-- the inn will drive you around and pick you up if you're going somewhere in the Fan, Shockoe Bottom, etc.. I hadn't really thought about it when I was picking the hotel, but it's a surprisingly nice perk once you've used it a couple times. And for exercise fanatics, there's a really well-equipped YMCA a block away that you can visit for free. (Outstanding.)

via flickr

So it was cool. I'm staying there next time I come to Richmond.

On the train to Richmond

I'm on the Amtrak from Raleigh, North Carolina to Richmond, Virginia. We're passing through the low pine woods and fields that I remember from when I grew up here-- to my botanically challenged eye this part of North Carolina and Virginia look pretty similar-- and little towns with white wooden houses and red brick main streets (broken up by the occasional strip mall and fast food complex). So even though I've never travelled this stretch of track, it feels awfully familiar.

Train travel has always felt more fraught with meaning than, say, driving or bicycling. Partly it's the role that trains have played in Southern literature or popular culture: think of the blues and country songs that feature train whistles in the distance, or the first and last train station scenes in In the Heat of the Night. More personally, the train was my Way Out: I first took the Southern Crescent when I went to visit colleges, and most years I would travel back and forth between school and home by train, carrying a duffel bag of clothes and backpack. It didn't hurt that the train from Richmond to Philadelphia left at 4 a.m., which meant I'd go to sleep in one part of the country and wake up in another. (It later became my route to archives and a thwarted affair.) So riding the train became a pretty archetypal thing.

The Raleigh train station is three blocks away from the hotel and conference center, though for some reason the front desk didn't tell me this, and I took a cab. Maybe their sense of distance was more cultural than physical, because when I stepped into the station-- a tiny place compared to Philadelphia or New York, two rooms with wooden benches-- I had the very distinct feeling of having moved from the world of global discourses about sustainable innovation and the cultural factors that support academic-industrial knowledge transfer, to the set of In the Heat of the Night. (There was no Rod Steiger trying to fix his air conditioner, though.) It was a bit of a shock, after several days of hearing English spoken with a variety of accents, along with Spanish, Korean, Arabic. Yes, there's a world outside the conference events. And yes, we are in the South.

It's also a reminder of just how easily intelligent people and well-meaning projects can become almost hermetically sealed in their own worlds. This isn't to criticize the conference organizers-- they did a terrific job, and are rightly proud of the role RTP has played in the development of the North Carolina economy-- but to note how closed a system most conference are. Between the conference hotel, the conference center (which share a common basement, so you can go between them without ever going outside), the restaurants and bars catering to conference-goers, the full schedule of events, the vast numbers of people with whom you exchange business cards-talk-drink-eat-network, and the psychological and physical stresses and challenges of sitting in uncomfortable chairs for hours on end, eating marginally healthy food, and fighting jet lag, it's easy for conferences to turn into their own worlds.

On one hand, it makes sense: you've come a long way and are doing a lot of work, so you don't want distraction; but on the other, it does contribute to a certain otherworldliness in your thinking. This may not be a big thing if you're at a big microbiology conference, but it's a little worrisome when you're in a field that deals very directly with people and their lives, and professes to take an interest in the specifics of place and local culture. I'm not an insider in this field by any means, but I get the sense that there's a tendency to think of regional development or economic development as a problem that can be solved with the right formula or model; and I wonder if unconsciously we tend to assume that people who are already living in the place we're charged with changing-- or the company we're asked to help transform-- are going to be more an impediment than a resource. Likewise, when you're a futurist, it's really easy to get caught up in your own models and abstractions, and to lose sight of the scenarios you write are ultimately really about people. For us, I think, we need a different kind of conference. (Actually I think the whole model of the conference as a mix of academic meeting and trade fair should be overthrown, but that's a different matter.)

Indeed, in my work I've tried to point out that there are often local cultural resources or technical skills that conventional development tends to ignore, and which smart developers or entrepreneurs should try to harness: the pursuit of the New Thing sometimes keeps us from seeing the continuing value of older forms of knowledge. Likewise, we eliminate manufacturing at our own long-term peril: making stuff is actually pretty hard, requires a lot more skill than we knowledge workers tend to acknowledge, and manufacturing exerts a gravitational pull on other economic activities. Both of these argue for approaches that take a more sympathetic yet opportunistic attitude to history and local culture: rather than pave it over, you should ask if the local knowledge ecosystem (as we like to call it) has resources you can reuse. "Sustainable development" (which is a new popular buzzword) should pay attention to knowledge ecologies as well as biological ones, and learn to see local culture as a potentially valuable resource that provides useful services-- just as smart developers will realize that a swamp might provide more value as a bulwark against floods than a parking lot.

Ironic that I argue for preserving and using culture and history after spending so long happily (or sometimes militantly) apart from my own past and the world where I spent the bulk of my childhood. And maybe timely that I notice it now.

So it was kind a relief to get out of that and into something different. After I found baggage check and dropped off my duffel bag (one from REI with rolling wheels and various cool pockets, not the Army surplus one I had in college), I went for a little walk. Lots of old stores selling tires, beauty supplies, and other goods; a few bars or clubs, closed in the morning; and some vacant lots. And in the middle of it was a store converted into an artists' studio.

[To the tune of The Allman Brothers Band, "Melissa," from the album The Allman Brothers-A Decade Of Hits 1969 - 1979 (I give it 4 stars).]

Welcome back to the South

I'm in Raleigh, North Carolina for the next couple days, for the big International Association of Science Parks conference.

I haven't been to North Carolina in ages. I spent a summer at Duke in their precollege program 25 years ago-- it was a great time, but it more or less ruined my senior year, as it deepened my already substantial teenage "I wanna get out of there and get on with my real life and this rinky-dink high school is NOT it" angst-- and I spent a day or two in Raleigh at the NC State archives in 1994 or so, but that was one of those trips where all I was doing was taking notes on old correspondence and had no interactions at all with the place. I don't remember anything about Raleigh itself-- where I stayed, what NC State was like, where I ate lunch-- but I still remember working through the correspondence between Architecture School Dean Henry Kamphoefner and Buckminster Fuller.

The IASP conference is one of the big science parks managers' and developers' conferences. My friend Anthony is doing one of the big talks, and I'm here to meet with our clients, meet various other people, and talk about the next phase of our work on the future of science cities.

I'd forgotten how lush North Carolina is. It's all that summer heat and humidity, which is already showing signs of appearing. California isn't exactly a barren wasteland, but the South always feels more verdant. (It must have been an extraordinary thing to come here from Europe 300 years ago, and to see these spectacular forests.)

I still have visceral ambivalent feelings about the South. On one hand, I like the land, the premium Southern culture places on friendliness and gentility, and the relatively low cost of living; on the other, I remember a certain amount of downside as well (kind of a cross between Faulkner and Bruce Hornsby), and I wonder how much easier a time my bookish, mixed race kids would have here. Probably Atlanta and RTP, which now have pretty large Asian populations and the kinds of service / information economies, would be fine; maybe Richmond would be too. But I'm happy having the kids where they are.

A few of my favorite things: What I enjoy about travel, biking, workshops, and cooking

In the last few days I've been doing a lot of stuff: biking, organizing a Memorial Day dinner, preparing for a week-long trip to the East Coast, thinking about the craft and design of workshops. (These are the expert workshops that I organize all over the place.)

In many ways these are very different activities, but I really enjoy them all. I recently realized that despite their differences, they actually share a few qualities.

1) They're active, embodied knowledge.

Obviously bicycling is physical, but cooking is a nice combination of fine motor skill and lifting big heavy things (or in my case, avoiding setting myself on fire); you're always on your feet in a workshop; and travel is pretty physically strenuous, for good and bad reasons. Maybe I'm getting older, I'm less of a couch potato, or my ADD is increasing (and I know these are somewhat mutually exclusive explanations), but I find my patience with sitting for long hours and just reading is decreasing. I can do it, but I'm happier engaging my body. And nothing is better than activities where you're involving your body, but you have to think about what you're doing. (Gregg Zachary had a great piece last year on the rediscovery of the virtues of manual work. I'm part of a movement.)

cycling hunter's point, via flickr

Like Richard Sennett's craftsman (and I really recommend his book), I enjoy things that are physical or tangible, but also engage the mind. Thoughtful action is where it's at.

gestural interface missile command, via flickr

2) There are real deadlines.

My capacity for finishing things that have open-ended deadlines, or fake deadlines ("so we all agree that we'll finish our tasks by next week, right? right?"), is plummeting to near zero. Too much other stuff in my life that absolutely has to get done.

hard deadlines: flames don't wait, via flickr

So hard deadlines are good for me now. Essential even. The workshop starts at exactly this time, the plane leaves at exactly that time, the guests are arriving now. Heard deadlines also put a nice bound on craftwork, by preventing you from tinkering forever with something. A paragraph could always be better, but as Sennett writes, the demands of the trade force craftsmen to accept limits, to do the best job they can within the time they have, and to learn to be satisfied with that. As graphic designers say, "finished is good."

3) They require preparation.

The day of the cookout, I spent hours chopping vegetables, checking marinades, cleaning off platters (you can never have too many platters at a BBQ), locating plates and cups, setting up staging areas for food and drinks, laying out tools, etc. (I noticed, though, that this wasn't tedious, it was pleasant. It was a classic example of what Csíkszentmihályi calls flow.) Likewise, when you travel, you've got to think a lot about what to pack, how to structure your time, how to get among different places, etc.. A bike won't work with a flat tire, nor will a cyclist work if he's dehydrated, so you'd better be prepared for those possibilities. Every ride requires some kind of adjustment: technical climbs mess up gears; thorns flatten tires; I get hungry. Having the resources to deal with those things lets me keep riding.

With workshops, you have to think in advance about everything, and I mean everything: you have to go over the agenda minute-by-minute, think about the flow of the day, tinker with questions and exercises to eliminate ambiguity and focus people, lay out materials, move the furniture around, make sure the caterers know when to appear, etc., etc. (Indeed, there are things that we normally don't think about that I'd like to start experimenting with, like lighting and ambient sound, making some activities more embodied and physical-- sitting is exhausting-- and playing with the day's menu to keep people from getting weighed down by muffins and too much coffee.)

Good preparation doesn't require you to think just about one thing. It requires you to think about a lot of different things, big and small; to think about timing and process; about division of labor; about contingencies and strategies. That's part of what makes it pleasant.

future of science workshop, malaysia, via flickr

But here's the important thing.

Some of that preparation is meant to help you keep things on track, and do things exactly the right way. But most serious preparation isn't about scripting. Rather, its about making it possible for you to adapt to whatever actually happens. I've never had a workshop run exactly the way I imagined it would: more people show up, they turn out to be interested in other things than we'd discussed before, the room isn't laid out the way we expected-- a thousand different things can go akimbo.

I used to think that the point of planning workshops in such great detail was so I'd have more control over them. Wrong. You never have control. You have whatever you have when you get in the room. The point of doing all that planning is to deeply understand the intentionality and philosophy behind the workshop, so you can improvise your way to the same end-point, and you have the tools at hand to do so.

perimeter institute, waterloo, via flickr

[Update: I've realized that this is my complaint about humanities graduate training: it socializes you to believe that you possess skills that are useful only in a very specific future-- namely tenure track jobs in your field-- and train you to believe that you're less qualified to succeed at a different future, and that any other future is a failure.]

If you know that you're going to go off the map-- if events are going to conspire to send you in another direction, and they will-- the best that you can do is have the right gear, and a clear picture of where you want to go.

4) They have serendipity.

The upside of plans not working out the way you expect is that they can work out better. Sometimes the very coolest thing isn't on the map, and the only way to find it is to venture into the unknown.

One of the great pleasures of having a big party is that mixing up friends who don't know each other can have pleasant results for everyone. The best rides are ones that have a brilliant hill and view that you didn't know about. The best trips are the ones that expose you to something you've never seen before, or didn't even know was cool. I fell in love with Budapest not because I'd always wanted to go there, but because it's an amazing, complicated, Old World post-socialist place that I find alternately fascinating and frustrating. I love London because it rewards walking: I know it well enough to be able to navigate by Tube or on foot, but every time I go out in the evening I discover something-- a little square, a park, a row of businesses-- that charms and captivates, and that I'd never heard of.

surprise in the london underground, via flickr

Workshops have serendipity too. Tons of it. You want to build connections between ideas or fields that even experts hadn't seen before, or explore the cross-impact of trends that people normally think about separately. When that works, the results are awesome-- and the amazing thing is, the results are awesome a lot more often than you'd expect. You never know what the outcome of a workshop is going to be-- and if you do, there's really no point in having it in the first place. This doesn't mean that a workshop shouldn't have certain goals or deliverables; far from it. But it's like an evening walk in London: you know where you're going to end up, you know that there are certain landmarks you'll pass, but you don't know what else you're going to see along the way. Your job is to be open to the serendipity, so you can take advantage of it.

5) They draw out people.

I mean this in two senses. First, they can push you do things you didn't know you could. Good rides challenge you to do things you didn't think you were capable of, or leave you exhausted by happy with your performance.

Second, they open up a space for people to contribute. My wife used the cookout as an opportunity to repot a bunch of flowers in the backyard, dig out and repot some aging bamboo, and do other things on her gardening/home improvement list. Once kids started arriving, my daughter made (or taught the kids how make) balloon swords, which they then played with all evening. I hadn't thought of either of these, but people commented on how nice the backyard looked, and the kids all left exhausted and uninjured. Win.

perimeter institute, waterloo, via flickr

Workshops require both kinds of drawing out. Running a workshop isn't an exercise in controlling other people, but it's a hard task to create a venue in which everyone can think seriously, think differently, and think together.

It's also not about getting a certain result, but about creating the conditions out of which interesting new things will emerge. Of course, workshops have objectives, but as a facilitator, you have to approach them obliquely, and recognize that the actual work and thinking will be done by participants: you're just ("just" isn't quite the right word!) there to help make it happen.

workshop in laxenburg, astria via flickr

6) You can push sometimes, but mainly you have to flow.

You can challenge people, but you can't order them to be innovative. You can try to get guests to mingle or introduce them to each other, but you can't make them be chatty and friendly. You can also push yourself to some degree, but recognize that pushing doesn't get you everything: you can get to the airport on time, but you can't control the weather and need to be able to go with whatever the situation presents.

my son on a happier ride

This morning I got an unexpected lesson on pushing versus flow from my son. We were biking to school, and he has the habit of standing up while pedaling. I can't get him to stop (he's seven, after all), so I was trying to teach him how to do it in a way that maintains his balance. He got frustrated and mad, which made him distracted; and so he took a spill. Bad enough to break the mirror on his bike, add a couple nicks to the brakes or handlebars, and require some ice and band-aids when he got to school. Fortunately nothing on him was broken, and he'll be fine.

As I try to tell the kids, biking is one of those things that demands mindfulness: you have to watch the road, know what gear you're in, know where the cars are, know how tired you are. You can push yourself, but if you lose your concentration-- if you lose the flow-- you're likely to crash. In the course of pushing him, I made him lose what little flow he had.

Still, any spill that doesn't send you to urgent care is a learning opportunity, not an accident. And as a friend of mine wrote after hearing about the crash,

But falling is an essential part of growth. It teaches you where the boundaries are. If you never push hard enough to fall, you will never know if you could grow twice as much or twice as fast-- because you are playing it safe.

So across all these activities-- and maybe across everything you do-- hitting that mix of pushing and flow, planning but staying open to serendipty, and being active is key.

[To the tune of Keith Jarrett, "Hourglass, Part 2," from the album Staircase (I give it 4 stars).]

The view from Fort Baker this afternoon

Doing some calls and email

Sitting on the veranda. Wifi really changes your life, you know?

The view from Fort Baker

Beautiful day here in Sausalito!

The kinds of sign I'm glad I don't see around here

A sign on the road in Nairobi:

[via the Freakonomics blog]

Weekend at Hidden Villa

This weekend my son and I spent two night at Hidden Villa. It was a trip organized by the parent of a classmate of my son's, and it was us and about half a dozen other families. Hidden Villa was founded by the same people who started Peninsula School (the Duvenecks were amazingly entrepreneurial-- they also were involved in the creation of the Pacific Arts League, and they've immortalized by having a Palo Alto neighborhood named after them), so it has something of a special resonance with Peninsula families.

Hidden Villa is still a working farm, and there are a couple farm stands just to the left of the entrance. There's a pretty large organic garden, chickens (the eggs are excellent, I'm told), and a number of cows, goats and sheep.

via flickr

While the kids were all excited about going camping at Hidden Villa-- they'd all been there on field trips at least once-- we were actually staying at the hostel, which consists of several heated cabins near a terrific lodge. (Basically, any time you get ready for a weekend by going to Costco rather than REI, you can tell it's not going to be real camping.) The lodge is a wonderful building, large and spacious, not particularly luxurious, but incredibly comfortable to be in.

via flickr

And it's one of those spaces that, because of where it's situated, manages to feel wonderfully luxurious. I especially liked the screened-in porch, which for some ancient reason I'm drawn to.

via flickr

We did a potluck dinner the first night, then various of us took charge of the remaining meals. We didn't have a complicated schedule for cleanup, but somehow it all worked out: I think when you're a group of parents of small kids, cleaning up is kind of automatic. The idea of either leaving the dishes for tomorrow, or not doing anything while other people were working, were both kind of unthinkable.

Besides, the lodge has a fabulous kitchen. Propane rather than gas for the stove, which means it heats up more slowly than normal, but otherwise it was a fantastic workspace.

via flickr

Saturday morning we went for a hike, which led (after a refreshing uphill climb) to a stream that the kids found very diverting. It also reminded me that for kids, the most important thing you can bring to keep them happy and uncomplaining isn't lots of water, or good shoes, but other kids. If you're with your parents, everything quickly becomes a drag; if you're with classmates, it's all cool.

via flickr

After the hike and lunch, we went on a tour of the farm. Needless to say, the kids loved the chance to interact with the animals-- pet the goats and sheep, feed the chickens, that sort of thing.

via flickr

I realized at a certain point that, in addition to the obvious appeal of a beautiful natural location, there were two things I really liked about the weekend, and it got me thinking.

The first was the very unforced combination of quiet and company. I was with a dozen other adults and a lot of kids, but I never had the feeling that it was a strain: everyone got along very well, but things were unstructured enough-- and there were always enough parents around who could keep an eye on the kids, who paid us essentially no mind whatsoever and formed their own self-regulating tribe-- to allow you to wander off on your own. I enjoyed spending time with them because they're really nice people, but also because I didn't have the sense that anyone had to be entertained.

The kids were also really easy to deal with. They're generally a very well-behaved bunch, but you put them together, and they essentially seal themselves off from adults, lose any real interest in any of us adults, and take care of themselves until dinner. In the evening, they'd play games, or cluster around whatever parents were reading (everyone, and I mean every single child, brought a couple Bone books, so it was a virtual Bone-reading marathon all weekend). Very different from how things can be at home: my kids are pretty independent, but I felt like I spent less time interacting with ten kids there than I do with my own at home.

It was an interesting experience, and it made me wonder: why in the world don't we do this all the time? If kids are easier to deal with in larger numbers (a counterintuitive proposition, but maybe not that inaccurate), why do we insist on (or default to) taking care of them ourselves? Maybe the cohousing movement is onto something....

via flickr

The second thing that made me really think was the realization that part of what I liked about the weekend was that it offered some of the same rewards of traveling: it offered a chance to strip away life to a few essentials, and to live with a degree of thoughtfulness and enforced simplicity-- but without the frantic, focused edge than I have to maintain when I'm on the road. At one point, when I was sitting in the lodge and playing Go (the parents include a number of really serious Go players, and I got my ass kicked all weekend), it struck me that for these two days at least, I had effectively traded dealing with stuff for interacting with people. It was a good deal.

A few months ago I went through a phase of throwing out old stuff, and as I've lost weight I've been shedding clothes that are too large for me. But I now wonder: could I get rid of another 95% of what I own, keep a core of essential stuff, and have a better life? Do I need all those books from graduate school? Am I really any more likely to finish Barbara Stafford's Body Criticism than I am to get through the rest of Normal Cantor's the Civilization of the Middle Ages? Of course not. So why am I keeping them? Things like travel and this past weekend suggest that it would be possible for me to radically reduce the number of objects I have in my life, and not really miss them.

via flickr

I'm not about to renounce all worldly goods, and I don't want to sound like a cross between Thoreau and Wigan Ludgate (the hacker-turned-recluse in William Gibson's Count Zero). But would I be happier with a much smaller, thoughtfully designed, and ruthlessly efficient personal infrastructure?

Could one live like that all the time? Out of the equivalent of a couple, say, a couple large suitcases? At what point does owning less make you richer? Can you, in essence, trade things for more friends? I'm not sure, but it's worth trying to figure out. Like I said, a monastic renunciation of worldly goods isn't in my future; but maybe a lighter life would be more worth living.

China, land of different collective tacit knowledge, here I come

I'm on the Caltrain from San Francisco to Palo Alto. I spent the day here getting a visa to go to China at the end of the month. I'm planning to be there for about a week, mainly in Beijing.

The Chinese consulate is located on the edge of Japantown. Today it had police barricades and several fairly bored-looking cops, and a couple Falun Gong demonstrators. I don't know if this is normal (I suspect the demonstrators kind of come with the place), or whether the police are here because of the Tibetan anniversary; however, the only excitement was inside, and caused by a few irate people yelling about their service. I got there at about 10:45, and joined a long line of people; initially I was seriously worried about whether I'd be able to get a visa today, but quickly realized that the line was moving relatively quickly.

Once inside I was struck by something else: that while my first impression was that it was pretty chaotic-- lots of people, several very long lines, a certain number of raised voices, an intercom that didn't work THAT well-- after a few minutes I could see that it was, in its way, pretty speedy. There were hundreds of people there, and all things considered, everything moved rather fast. Whatever social cues I follow that tell me that things are going well or poorly didn't quite apply here.

It put me in mind of Harry Collins' description of tacit knowledge. As he explains it, there's contingent tacit knowledge, which is stuff we don't talk about for various reasons but could. Somatic tacit knowledge, in contrast, is physical: putting on clothes is a good example (if you watch young children, they're figuring out how to interpret various kinds of resistance, and figure out that THIS means the sleeve is turned inside-out, THAT means the collar is just to the left, etc.). Finally, there's collective tacit knowledge, which you can only get by immersing yourself in a society. Riding a bike requires somatic tacit knowledge; riding a bike in traffic requires collective tacit knowledge; riding a bike in Copenhagen, Davis CA, and Mumbai requires the same somatic knowledge, but verrry different collective knowledge.

There are social signs we learn that tell us whether a place or situation is safe or unsafe, chaotic or orderly, quiet or tense: how people stand, how they speak, how frustrated or angry they act, whether there are kids or old people present, how friendly the guards or soldiers are, etc. etc. ad infinitum. The ability to read those signs is one thing that distinguishes insiders from outsiders, because they vary from culture to culture. (Not knowing them is one of the things that can get you into trouble in a strange place; and their comforting presence is one of the things that you pay for when you stay in places like business hotels.) Making sense of the consulate, I realized, required a slightly different body of collective knowledge than I apply when I'm in downtown Palo Alto. Once I got that, I was able to see that it was actually a smoother operation than I'd first realized, the presence of loudly angry aged Chinese women aside.

And indeed, I got in right under the wire: I was the last visa applicant they took before breaking for lunch. The whole process took about 45 seconds: I handed in my paperwork, picture, and passport, had a brief discussion about whether I wanted rush service (I did), and was told to come back in a few hours. Sure enough, that afternoon (after lunch in Japantown, which seems now to largely consist of Korean restaurants, and some work at Cafe Murano, a very cool little place on Steiner) they had it ready.

The visa takes up a full page in my passport, for some reason. Whenever I got to the EU, I'm lucky to get stamped; Singapore and Malaysia have nice-looking entry and exit stamps; but China and South Africa take up whole pages in my passport. There's probably some contingent social knowledge that explains why this is.

Walk this morning

After getting some coffee, I headed out to take some pictures of Gammage Memorial Auditorium, the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed complex that I'd seen in the dark a couple nights earlier. I wanted to walk around it during the daytime, and get a better sense of what it looked like.

via flickr

Usually when I travel somewhere, I go for a long walk. On the better ones, I encounter some surprising thing that I didn't set out to see, but which makes the whole thing worthwhile. This morning, it was this. A sign on top of Lattie Coor Hall, it says "Explore."

via flickr

Evening in Scottsdale

We held our workshop on the future of science and economic development today. It wrapped up at 5, after which I went for a swim and some time in the hot tub; I then met up with my colleagues, and we went over to Scottsdale for dinner. We first went to the Billet Bar, a biker bar in old town, for a drink. (I had a Diet Coke-- I've pretty much given up on alcohol, as I've become an unaccountable lightweight.)

via flickr

After that, it was to Bandera for dinner. It was really outstanding.

via flickr

It turns out that Phoenix-- and in particular Scottsdale-- is, in certain important respects, an economic offshoot of Southern California: according to our local host, who's a geography professor at ASU and therefore entirely trustworthy on such matters, part of the porn industry has relocated to Phoenix, as have a number of rappers. Apparently it's easy to get back to LA, and there are no papparazzi (sp?) here. (The Billet Bar has "Industry Nights," which must be quite the scene.)

Not only does it have all that, but Scottsdale was also the home of Frank Lloyd Wright (in his Taliesin West phase), and is where the Taser was invented. Truly an all-American city.

The great Aeron Chair Rodeo

Every year the chairs are driven south to their spring feeding grounds in Arizona....

Empty computer center

One of the most striking things I saw during tonight's walk around Arizona State was this:

via flickr

It's a computer center. And it's empty. Because it's closed. At first, I literally couldn't believe it. After years around Stanford, seeing a computer cluster that's not surrounded by students, and open 24/7, didn't really register. Proof once again that neuroscience is right, and that we tend to see what we believe, not the other way around.

via flickr

If I were Tom Friedman, this would be the beginning of a piece about how this is an example of how American competitiveness is in decline, and how in China there would be 50,000 students using a facility like this. He'd talk about how in Berkeley a similar center-- which he saw while on his way to play golf with the head of Cisco, before heading to Dubai-- was filled with graduate students, but they were all Chinese.

View from my hotel room

Greetings from the Tempe Mission Palms.

Greetings from Phoenix!

SFO in the rain

Denver Art Museum

Sunday afternoon, I braved the single-digit temperature, ice on the roads, and responsibility for my dad's beloved Honda Element to go see the Hamilton Wing of the Denver Art Museum, the new (2006) Daniel Libeskind addition.

denver art museum, via flickr

Over the last few years, Denver has been building the area around DAM into a more coherent cultural complex, and trying to turn it into a Destination. The Denver Public Library is right beside the art museum; the historical society and state museum are up the block; and there's a new performing arts complex.

the old (now north wing), denver art museum, via flickr

The main stairway is a wonderfully dynamic space: not only is it a petting zoo of exotic angles, but as I returned to it through the afternoon, it looked different as the light changed.

stairway, via flickr

I know people have criticized the building for being confusing and vertigo-inspiring, but I found it no harder to navigate than a more conventional, square building. Each floor has two or three galleries, and once you have a working mental model of the basic layout, you can figure out things pretty easily.

daniel richter exhibit, via flickr

In fact, the unusual shape of the building probably makes it easier to orient yourself: when you're in a gallery that comes to a sharp point at one end, you know that the exit is in the other direction.

fourth floor: modern and african, via flickr

More generally, I think the shape of the galleries gives the exhibits a measure of dynamism that they wouldn't have in a more conventional space. The Clyfford Still exhibit, for example, has a number of huge paintings-- Still was arguably the first Abstract Expressionist, and he worked on the large scale characteristic of the movement-- that weren't just hung from the walls; they were suspended from the ceiling in a way that made them look like they were either floating, or had emerged from the angled wall behind them.

clyfford still, via flickr

And spending time in the Daniel Richter exhibit, which has a lot of tough, street-wise paintings, was definitely made more interesting by the space. I'm not sure that this would enhance the experience of looking at Dutch still-life paintings or Venetian portraits... but maybe it would.

daniel richter exhibit, via flickr

View from my seat

I'm... conveniently near the galley. Should make getting up easier. Which us good, because we seem to be delayed at least an hour. But it's an aisle seat on an exit row, so I really have no complaints.

This trip was very good. Normally when I come to Colorado it's with the kids, so even though we stay with my parents, I'm here in my capacity as Grandchild Travel Manager and Wrangler I hadn't quite realized how consuming that role is, and how much it reduces the opportunity for the adults to talk amongst themselves. We all so naturally reorient around the children, and it happens so gradually, it's easy to not notice what gets lost. So it may be selfish, but it was good to see them without the kids.

Denver Museum of Art

At the new wing of the DMA. It's a new wing, technically, but it so completely overshadows the old building, it's almost sad.

This should be interesting.

Evergreen this morning

Extremely cold this morning! It snowed a little last night, and last night's low is forecast to be today's high.

Nonetheless, I may go down to the Denver Art Museum and see the new Daniel Liebskind (sp?) wing, which I hear is very interesting, possibly even vertigo-inducing.

Breakfast at the Pang compound

The sun is coming up, and we're drinking tea and reading. Pop's finishing a biography of Admiral Marc Mitscher, I'm working on an end of cyberspace chapter. Food later.

Why I love to travel

It's 5:22 a.m., and I'm in a Supershuttle, headed to the Tampa/St Petersburg airport. I got here less than 48 hours ago, and I'm on my way home. William Byrd's Mass for Four Voices is playing on my iTunes, which gives a curiously spiritual feel to the trip. It's not a ride to the airport, its a pilgrimage.

I was thinking about why I like to travel-- not just like it, but really look forward even to short trips like these.

Novelty. Going to new places is really interesting. Going to London and Singapore is no longer novel, but I'm far from exhausting what's interesting about those places (the only time I've been to the British Museum was with my wife, a year and half ago, and I spent most of it staring slack-jawed at the Rogers courtyard).

I'm good at it. I know how to pack, how to get ready for trips, how to navigate airports and customs and security, how to get what I need from hotel and conference center people, how to find decent restaurants and interesting things to do with a free couple hours. There's a craft to travel, and even though it's as idiosyncratic as writing-- everyone's style is different, even if their objectives are the same-- I've learned to do it pretty well, and am still improving.

There are clear goals. Success is easy to measure: you catch your plane, get to the hotel, get prepared, deliver the talk, facilitate the meeting, build the map, please the client, etc. Not a lot of ambiguity most of the time. This contrasts with a lot of my life, where there are very big, but long-term and amorphous, goals, and the linkage between completing them and the reward is-- not unclear, exactly, but not very tight. You finish a piece for a client, and it may be a month before you get any feedback; six months pass between sending an article to the editors and getting reprints; and I'll probably be years before some of the things I do for the kids pay off (if even if they do, I might never hear about them).

On the road, though, I can practice a measure of decisiveness and focus that's hard to exercise in my normal multitasking, collaborative life.

I think a lot when I travel. Some of my most productive hours and best ideas come on planes. Partly this is a matter of necessity-- often I have to 16 hours to finish that keynote or else-- but there's something liberating about having 10 hours sealed in your own little pressurized, caffeinated world, with nothing to do but think and write. (The fact that most of the time the movies are lousy is a godsend. Singapore Airlines' 100 channels is a bit of challenge for me, but I usually manage to avoid it until the return flight.)

Away from it all, uninterruptible, and accustomed to having good ideas pop into my head, it's easy to get into that state where good thoughts appear. And even if I don't have some intellectual breakthrough, I usually get enough e-mail written to feel okay about the trip.

The privilege. Business travel is stressful in some ways, but luxurious in one important way: you spend a certain amount of your time around people whose job it is to take care of things for you. Not quite take care of you as a person; but in my normal life someone else isn't carrying my bags, doing all the driving, serving the food, getting the conference room set up, etc. At home my wife and I share the labor, I've got the kids doing more things, and they help with small tasks like carrying in groceries; but that's not the same as being in situations where it's someone else's job to do things for you.

And often I'm lucky to be going somewhere as someone's guest. I may be working for them, but the act of traveling imposes certain obligations and courtesies on all parties. Even if you're picking up the cost of a person's trip, you're still nice to them.

Of course, there are also times when it's disorienting and alienating. Sitting in a near-empty terminal in the pre-dawn hours, it's easy for that "what the hell am I doing here" sense of anomie to settle over you. But for now, at least, it's a price worth paying.

Dinner at the Moonlight Diner

We stopped for an early dinner at the Moonlight Diner, a reconstructed (or just faux 1950s) diner near the Denver International Airport.

Greetings from Denver; or, déjà vu all over again

Think I'll stay a while this time! And as cool as it is on the inside, DIA's main terminal is really spectacular on the outside.

In SFO, headed to Denver

Less than 24 hours since I was last here, I'm back at SFO, headed to Colorado to spend a few days with my dad and stepmother.

I brought my end of cyberspace manuscript and a couple other things I'm working on. Lest this sound anti-family, consider this: the last time I talked to my dad (yesterday when I was in DIA), we spent about 20 minutes talking about the transferability of science park models developed around the Atlantic Ocean to the Indian Ocean, and the unintended consequences of Singapore's immigration policy for the development of scientific communities in Asia. This is typical. The apple didn't fall far from the tree.

Though I also hope to get in some skating or skiing.

Back in Denver, connecting to SFO and home

Might go to the main terminal and admire the architecture. Or I'll stay here and write. Writing wins.

Greetings from St Petersburg

I have tomorrow morning at the crack of dawn, so I need to get this posted quickly.

My trip to St Petersburg has been short-- any trip where you get in late and go right to sleep, the wake up the next morning and immediately call the airline to do early checkin for your return flight is, by definition, short-- but it's been pleasant. We have a really good client we worked with here, which always goes a long way to making an experience good. And St Petersburg is more pleasant than I expected: it's not very big or exciting, but quite nice. I can see why people live her.

via flickr

The hotel has also been nice. It's a 1920s hotel, restored to its former glory, and is an excellent example of Roaring 20s Florida Mediterranean Hospitality Style. Though a couple things confuse me a bit. For one thing, there's this really complex thing over the bed:

via flickr

Fortunately the painting is bolted down, but the first time I saw it, I thought, that thing's going to kill me in my sleep. Obviously it hasn't, but still, that's not the kind of thought that interior decorating should inspire.

Then there's the furnishing of the bath: lemongrass bath soap, mint thyme shampoo, yuzu bergamot body lotion, and lavender hand soap. Apparently the cool thing now is to feel like you're taking a shower in the kitchen of an upscale Vietnamese restaurant. (Actually, the lemongrass bath soap rocked.)

via flickr

After work my colleague and I found a nice tapas and ceviche restaurant near the marina, and had dinner.

via flickr

We then walked along the marina, which was crowded with people doing some kind of charity race. It was nice to be out and about with so many people.

via flickr

Greetings from the Renaissance Vinoy

Welcome to Hell

The ground transportation waiting room. Christmas Muzak is blasting, the Howard Johnsons courtesy van is circling like a shark...

Wait, did William Hung ever do a country music Christmas album? Lord, take me now.

Made it to Tampa. It's just a bit humid here.

Just landed. Pretty nice airport so far.

Snow

I just noticed there's snow on the ground here at DIA. So I'm going from cold and foggy (SFO in the winter), through the snow, to Florida tropical. Makes you think. Mainly it makes you think, how do I dress for THAT?

Frisky

The last couple times I've flown on my own, I've gotten frisked at security. Nothing serious or time-consuming, but it didn't seem random.

Today I finally found out why.

Over the last few months I've lost about 25 pounds. I always fly in a certain model of shirt, a 511 tactical with giant pockets. As I've gotten lighter, the shirt has looked bigger on me; and apparently security gets suspicious if if looks like you could be hiding something other than some extra pounds.

I've already spent a small fortune on tailoring, but maybe once I've hit my target, I'll take these in and have them taken in. (Tailoring's not cheap, I've discovered, but neither are these shirts; and I never like giving up something that still works. It's the impulse that explains why I still have a Newton in my garage.)

But.... Do I now look more like I fit some profile? After I first appeared in her class with my new glasses and beard, one of my daughter's friends said, "You look evil! Handsome, but EVIL!" Is she some kind of security savant? Was Charles Laughton onto something when he observed to Peter Ustinov that all Roman emperors are inevitably thin (this was in "Spartacus")? Does less body fat increase the odds that you're a terrorist?

In Denver

Here for a few minutes, just changing planes. Tampa ho!

Blogging from SFO

I'm at SFO, sitting on the floor near a power outlet, topping up my laptop and iPhone before I get on the plane. There are three or four other otherwise perfectly sane people around me doing the same thing.

The fact that I've got both my iPhone and laptop with me makes this an interesting experiment in technological and communications choice. I'm already a pretty obsessive blogger when I'm on the road. How will having the iPhone change that? I can see a couple likely changes.

More straight-on photoblogging. I can use the virtual keyboard, but wouldn't yet think of writing anything really long or important on it. I already do lots of pictures with short text on the kids blog-- probably too much, in fact-- so it wouldn't be unnatural to port that existing habit over to this blog and the iPhone.

Tweeting rather than blogging. I can see the appeal of this: Twitterific is really pretty nice, and I've got text messaging to Twitter set up too. And if I wanted to self-report in real time, that would be a good way to do it. But that raises the next big question:

Real-time, or nearly real-time? I've done just fine blogging things from my hotel room or lunch, writing a long post or two at the end of the day. And I don't really think anyone who cares about me follows my travels so closely as to want to know where I am in real time: they all have school or jobs (or jobs at schools), or aren't in my time zone (whatever that is).

So if I shift over to tweeting more and blogging less, or writing lots of really short posts, it's going to be just for me.

To some degree, I see the resistance of real time self-broadcasting, and the choice of blog over Twitter, as... not quite a moral choice, but a more disciplined one. Or at least, it ought to be a choice, a decision rather than a reflexive assumption that pushing something out fast is better than waiting until I'm in the hotel.

I can already tell that most of my e-mail is going to happen on the iPhone, though. Unless there are some secret outrageous roaming charges that will bite me at the end of the month, the iPhone will clearly be preferable (no wifi).

At SFO

On my way to Tampa! I have copies of "Miami Vice" and "Wild Things" on my iphone for cultural reference. And some Carl Hiassen. If Florida isn't like it is in the moviess and books, I'll be really bummed.

Taylor Street this morning

Being Dad

We spent the last couple days in Disneyland. One of my main responsibilities there, after keeping the kids from getting abducted, is to go on the wet and/or scary rides. The kids' favorite is the California Grizzly, a white water rafting ride.

Somehow I was the one who seemed to get the wettest.

I was really glad I remembered by waterproof camera bag-- it saved my electronics from a watery death. (My small Moleskine notebook, however, was not so lucky; it's still drying out.)

Forget an election upset-- THIS is scary

As everyone knows, I love Ryanair.

So you can imagine how enthusiastic I am about this idea:

Budget airline Ryanair is drawing up plans to offer trans-Atlantic flights as cheap as 10 euros ($12.70) before taxes to several U.S. cities from Britain and Ireland.

Forget the economy, health care, war, and all the rest of it. I'll vote for whoever promises to keep this from happening.

[Thanks for the nightmare, Zoë!]

Travel, Travel

The Crepe House

A nice place near the Opera House that we discovered today in San Francisco.

Quote of the day

From the New York Times, on contemporary air travel:

Who would have thought, after 30 years, that we’d be a flying 7-Eleven. You know, I mean we used to serve omelets and crepes for breakfast, and now it’s ‘Would you like to buy stackable chips or a big chocolate chip cookie for $3?'

[via Daniel Pink]

Travel

The kind of thing I didn't see when I was in South Africa

But my friends did:

food, South Africa, Travel, Travel

Greetings from Philadelphia

I'm settled in at the Omni Hotel, in lovely downtown Philadelphia. Actually, I'm not kidding: I'm across the street from Independence Park, near Independence Hall, the Philosophical Society, and other monuments of early American history.

I'm going to spend part of the morning with friends from school, then head back downtown to the Chemical Heritage Society. See the room I'm working in, rest up, then workshop time-- third one in a week, which I think is a personal record.

Philadelphia, Travel

Dinner tonight

I had the big performance today, a half-day workshop on the future of science parks. Afterwards we went across the street to Nelson Mandela Square-- essentially a large, upscale shopping mall-- to a seafood place called Montego Bay for dinner.

via flickr

Aside from the culture shock of eating dinner in South Africa in a restaurant named for a Jamaican geographical feature, it was a good time. And the seafood was really quite good.

via flickr

I loved the menu's alternate spelling of "nigiri."

via flickr

Afterwards I had to stop at the Seattle Coffee Co. for an espresso con pana.

via flickr

Tomorrow I head back to the States. I would have liked to have stayed longer, of course, and seen more of the country-- I've hardly seen more than a few very unrepresentative blocks-- but I've got to get back to the office and my regular life. And of course, when you travel for work, you actually are supposed to work; everything else is a nice extra, not a privilege.

coffee, dinner, Johannesburg, South Africa, Travel

Lobby of the Intercontinental

Waiting for my friends, and heading out to dinner.